The Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) is an organisation under the department of defence production, ministry of defence, government of India. It produces a variety of items required by the defence and paramilitary forces. These include battle tanks, vehicles, arms and ammunitions, explosives, parachutes, clothing, etc. The OFB headquarters is located in Kolkata, and the 39 factories under it are spread over the entire country.

Project details
CMC's relationship with OFB dates back to the late 1980s, when we implemented the production planning & control (PPC) system at the OFB headquarters and all its factories, on a turnkey basis. PPC addressed the core areas of operations at these factories.

The major modules of the PPC are inventory management and analysis, purchase order planning and control, shop order release, material requirement planning, payment analysis, maintenance management, forecasting, vendor analysis, costing, tools control, work-in-progress, quality assurance and detailed operations scheduling. It ran on the Informix database and Magnix on a mainframe computer connected with dumb terminals. The OFB and its factories used the PPC system successfully for more than a decade. The system was maintained by CMC throughout this period.

Owing to obsolescence, maintaining PPC became very difficult. In 1998, OFB awarded CMC a turnkey project worth Rs140 million to migrate the user-friendly PPC system to the latest available platform.

The scope of work included (for 40 installations spread across India):

	Supply and installation of new servers, RDBMS and systems software
	Procurement, supply, installation and set-up of local area networks at all 40 locations
	Migration of application software along with live data
	Development of PPC for two new factories
	Migration from a host-based system to a client-server-based system
	Training and delivering user manuals

Strengths

	Domain knowledge in production planning and control
	Knowledge of the client's working environment
	Capability to provide an end-to-end IT solution
	Expertise in successfully implementing large turnkey IT projects
	Availability of service centres across India

Technical architecture
A mixture of host-based and client-server systems. Users can access the system through dumb terminals. For two modules, GUI-based access has been provided.

Benefits
Simpler and faster production planning and control from the receipt of the order to delivery, through an online integrated system; optimum inventory holding, leading to cost saving. Easier to retrieve production-related information, for management information and control.

Indicative client list

Ordnance Factory Board, Ministry of Defence

Contact
Head - Defence
CMC House
C-18, Bandra-Kurla Complex
Bandra (East)
Mumbai - 400 051
Tel: 022-26591000-2
Fax: 022-26591046
Email: defence@cmcltd.com